It was somewhere around April 1945 when my mother decided to pack up and leave my dad and Galveston, Texas, to join her parents and siblings in the Pacific Northwest, namely Washington State.
I can’t really blame her for calling her marriage to my dad quits. He was not the best provider for his children. In fact, he was more of a sperm donor: make babies and move on. I have brothers and sisters I don’t even know and to this day, I can think of only one Christmas gift my dad ever gave me: a cheap watch that broke the second week I had it. He would eventually end up marrying five times to four different women (my mother twice).
But when my mom loaded up her belongings and my older sister and headed north by northwest, she forgot one thing: me. I’m not judging; she did what she felt she had to do at the time, but she left me behind in a Galveston hospital, suffering from malnutrition (as I said, my dad wasn’t much of a provider). She did send a postcard to her father-in-law in Ruston, T.E. “Ed” Aswell, to inform him that I was in “a hospital” in Galveston. She neglected to say which one.
My grandfather immediately drove to Galveston and after battling the bureaucracy of two different hospitals (Galveston had only two at the time), was finally shown into the ward where I was. He told me many times that he would never forget seeing that frail, undernourished baby at the foot of his bed, clinging to the railing in order to stand. “His eyes were the biggest thing about him,” he remembered.
It took a pretty good battle, I’m told, for him to convince hospital staff that he was taking me home with him – something about there not not being a cow left in Texas if he didn’t get to walk out with me. But that’s how I came to live with my paternal grandparents until I married the love of my life, Betty, 52 years ago.
He and my grandmother were the best things that could’ve happened to a skinny, 18-month-old baby who was staring down the barrel of a lifetime of foster care until they intervened. God only knows where I might have ended up without their decision to take me in. I never called them Grandma and Grandpa. That would have been oh so wrong, for they were the only Mom and Dad I ever knew. That’s who they were – Mom and Dad.
They provided the moral compass, compassion, discipline and overall guidance a kid must have until Betty came along a couple of decades later to relieve them of that onus. I’m still a work in progress and Betty’s doing the best she can but I know how to say yes ma’am, yes sir, no ma’am, no sir, please and thank you.
We were poor by anyone’s standards – then or now – but three things I never lacked: love, shelter and food in my belly. My grandfather was a tough man. Besides being a truck farmer (he plowed an old mule until he finally saved enough to purchase a used, mostly unreliable Ford tractor), he also traded livestock, butchered hogs for some of the best sausage and ham you ever tasted, and worked as a concrete finisher. That last job was the hardest work I ever saw anyone do. I had to help him from time to time and I’m still in awe that his body held up for that work well into his seventies.
Did I mention he was tough? When my dad picked up a DWI in Monroe and asked my granddad to bail him out of jail, my granddad had two words in response: “Hell, no!” My dad served out a year’s jail sentence but my granddad never wavered. He simply would not, could not, tolerate alcohol – even though he did do a little bootlegging when times were really hard. A Ruston city judge once fined him $10 for bootlegging. When my grandfather refused to pay it, the judge paid it for him. Yes, those were different times.
But while he was tough as nails, he also could be as soft as melted butter.
Once, when I was just a kid back in the ’50s, he was driving in downtown Ruston when he spotted a couple pushing a child (a girl about seven or eight) in a wheelchair. She was wearing leg braces. The fact that they were black or that he’d never seen them before mattered not a whit to him: he stopped right smack dab in the middle of traffic, walked across the street and handed that little girl five dollars that I happen to know he could not afford. He was unable to speak when he got back behind the wheel.
My grandfather was a rarity for his time. He detested, loathed, hated, despised and otherwise abhorred the Klan. I well remember him saying on more than one occasion, “Any sonofabitch who has to hide under a sheet to do his dirty work ain’t a man – he’s a coward.” That little phrase got my skinny butt in a world of trouble a few years later.
He had a couple other adages he would throw out from time to time. He always taught me that every person I meet is a friend until they show they don’t want to be. It’s always that person’s call, he said.
I rode with him once to the old Ruston Oil Mill so he could purchase some feed for his cattle. He met a man on the loading dock and they stood and talked for nearly an hour while I sat in the truck. On the way home, he said somewhat offhandedly, “That fella back there is a liar and a thief.” I couldn’t comprehend why he would have spent so much time talking to someone like that, so I asked, “If he’s a liar and a thief, why were you friends with him?”
He pulled to the side of the road and stopped. He turned and pointed a beefy finger at me and said, “Son, always remember this: you can be friends with anybody as long as you know who they are.” I was about eight or nine at the time and that has stayed with me for nearly 70 years now, a constant reminder whenever I’m tempted to pre-judge someone.
He pulled to the side of the road on one other occasion – also when I was a small child and the event is burned into my brain. He had bought me a Milky Way candy bar and as he drove down the road, I tossed the wrapper out the truck window. I immediately felt a pop on the back of my head. At the end of a dark tunnel, I believe I saw Jesus waving me toward the light. My grandfather never said a word. He didn’t have to. But I knew to get out and retrieve that candy wrapper and to this day, I’ve never thrown so much as a gum wrapper out of my car window.
But he had a sense of humor, as well, and he could neutralize a tense situation with it when need be. Once, in West Monroe, he was stopped at a stop sign when a gravel truck bumped him from behind. It wasn’t serious and no real damage was done, but it really angered my grandfather to know the driver behind him wasn’t paying attention. So, he exited his truck to give the other driver a piece of his mind.
When he walked back to the driver’s door of the gravel truck, he saw that the driver’s forearm was about the size of my grandfather’s thigh (and my grandfather was no small man). Without missing a beat, my grandfather looked up with those beautiful blue eyes and asked, “Did I hurt you?” The other driver burst into laughter and they became friends on the spot.
He taught my cousins how to shoot craps. Jeanette and Cecil are brother and sister. When they had learned the ropes and paired off to play, Jeanette wanted to play for fun but Cecil insisted they play for real money, so they did. Jeanette had all his money in a matter of minutes and in a rage (they were kids, remember, so tempers flared rather easily; today, Cecil is one of the most generous, most gentle and patient people I know) he physically attacked her. She won that contest, too. But the really funny part was my grandfather sat there and watched as Jeanette twice took Cecil’s measure, never interfering. Only when it was over did he offer words of advice – to Cecil, something about never underestimating your opponent.
Now about that Klan comment that got me in trouble: In 1963, I was home on leave from the Air Force. Certain that the girls would be attracted to my uniform, I wore it when I went into Ruston to visit Stinson’s Music Box, Ruston’s only record store. While I was in there, two men entered whom I knew. I won’t mention their names, but my dad worked for one of them from time to time in his auto repair shop. They saw me in my uniform and asked me to come outside.
When we were out on the sidewalk where no one could hear, they asked me to join the Klan and to recruit fellow members of the military at Keesler AFB in Biloxi where I was stationed. Somewhat unadvisedly and unwisely, I repeated my grandfather’s line: “Any sonofabitch who has to hide under a sheet to do his dirty work ain’t a man – he’s a coward.”
They didn’t take it well and about an hour later, I was forced off the road south of Ruston on U.S. 167. This time there were four of them (I guess just 2-to-1 odds didn’t give them sufficient confidence) and they told me if I ever said something like that again, they’d kill me. That was a pretty stupid thing to do because I knew each one of them. When they left, I took out a pen and piece of paper and wrote the date, time, location, the threat they made and each of their names so that if something violent happened to me, there would at least be a record of their threat. I kept that piece of paper in my wallet until the last one had died.
The point of all this reminiscing and reflection is to say 50 years ago this week (May 20), my grandfather died. My first child wasn’t born until more than a year later, in 1972. I so regret that he missed the births of my three daughters.
He had diabetes and lost a leg to the disease. And while it slowed him down during his last year of life, it never stopped him. I can still see him in his wheelchair, going up and down the rows in his backyard garden, nurturing his watermelons, tomatoes, peas and corn. Watching him struggle alone and determined, politely refusing all offers of help, was something that both hurt deeply and filled me with an overwhelming sense of pride and love.
The day after his funeral, his beloved dog, Duke, disappeared. I guess he missed my grandfather.
After 50 years, I miss him, too, with an emptiness that’s impossible to put into words, but the memory of his sacrifice on my behalf will never fade.
And though I cried, I was so proud
To love a man so rare
–The Captain and the Kid, by Jimmy Buffett
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